Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora

Chee-Beng Tan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136230950
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

With around 40 million people worldwide, the ethnic Chinese and the Chinese in diaspora form the largest diaspora in the world. The economic reform of China which began in the late 1970s marked a huge phase of migration from China, and the new migrants, many of whom were well educated, have had a major impact on the local societies and on China.

This is the first interdisciplinary Handbook to examine the Chinese diaspora, and provides a comprehensive analysis of the processes and effects of Chinese migration under the headings of:

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• Population and distribution

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• Mainland China and Taiwan's policies on the Chinese overseas

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• Migration: past and present

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• Economic and political involvement

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• Localization, transnational networks and identity

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• Education, literature and media

The Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora brings together a significant number of specialists from a number of diverse disciplines and covers the major areas of the study of Chinese overseas. This Handbook is therefore an important and valuable reference work for students, scholars and policy makers worldwide who wish to understand the global phenomena of Chinese migration, transnational connections and their cultural and identity transformation.

Part I
Population and distribution

1
The Chinese overseas population

Peter S. Li and Eva Xiaoling Li

Much has been written about the history of emigration from China and the settlement of Chinese in Southeast Asia and other parts of the world (Benton and Pieke 1998; Fitzgerald 1972; Kwong and Miscevic 2005; Pan 1998; Wang 1981, 1991; Yen 1995). Despite this rich literature, relatively little has been published on the population of the Chinese overseas. The absence of longitudinal data, along with certain conceptual ambiguities in understanding the Chinese overseas, makes it difficult to estimate the past and future of this population. This chapter uses data from 1955 to 2009 to show the demographic trends of the population of the Chinese overseas, and provides an estimate of the future distribution based on its current rate of growth in different parts of the world.¹ The analysis indicates that even though Asia (not including China) accounts for the largest share of the Chinese overseas population, there has been a proportional shift in distribution from Asia to America. The shift is related to the differences in how the Chinese minority has been integrated in Southeast Asian and North American societies in the period after the Second World War.

The making of the Chinese overseas population

Past research on Chinese overseas stresses the influence of homeland on emigration from China and on the subsequent establishment of social organizations in destination societies (Pan 1998; Yen 1995). The emphasis on China as the original homeland is most evident in the way the history of Chinese overseas has been conceptualized.

Several ways have been proposed to demarcate the history of Chinese emigration and settlements overseas. For example, Chen (1989) proposed dividing the history of Chinese overseas into four periods based on the social and economic development of China. The first period of about four to five hundred years, from the beginning of the twelfth century to the latter part of the sixteenth century, was the beginning of merchant trade missions prompted by the rise in commodity production in China. The second period lasted for about 300 years from the latter half of the sixteenth century, when the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) lifted the imperial edict forbidding emigration, to the beginning of the Opium War (1839–42) that marked the beginning of domination of China by industrialized nations mainly of the West. Not only Chinese merchants traveled and settled outside of China, mainly Southeast Asia, but Chinese workers and laborers too were also drawn overseas as areas of Southeast Asia were colonized by western industrial nations. The third period, from 1840 to the founding the People’s Republic of China in 1949, saw massive emigration of Chinese laborers, sometimes under conditions of indentured servitude, to Southeast Asia, the Americas, Australia, and Africa to fill the labor shortages created by the decline of the slavery system. The last period, from 1949 to the present, represented a new era when China regained its international status and many overseas Chinese became assimilated in their adopted countries.

Zhuang (2001) proposed another scheme to periodize the history of Chinese overseas, linking it mainly to the historical trading relations between China and other nations and to the response of the imperial court to international trade. Accordingly, the history of Chinese migration prior to the twentieth century may be divided into three phases: (1) the phase prior to the thirteenth century when merchants and Buddhist monks travelled to and from China; (2) the second phase between the thirteenth and fifteenth century when the Chinese mercantile trade routes expanded; and (3) the third phase between the fifteenth and nineteenth century that witnessed the rise and fall of mercantile trade under the Ming dynasty,² and the expansion of Chinese trading and industrial activities in Southeast Asia during the seventeenth and eighteenth century despite the decline of the Chinese empire.

The two methods of periodization have in common using China as a reference point in marking the history of Chinese overseas. Chen’s classification is based on China’s economic and social development in relation to the West, while Zhuang’s scheme is premised on China’s trading relations with other nations. This line of thinking is understandable in view of the conventional perspective of viewing Chinese overseas as extensions of China beyond its boundaries. However, it also suffers from overstretching the history of the Chinese overseas to the pre-modern era and glossing over the finer distinctions in the more recent period.

Wang (2000) developed another framework to understand the history of Chinese overseas that lays less stress on homeland influence and more stress on the conditions of destination societies. Although it was not explicitly stated as a means to periodize the history of Chinese migration and settlement, it does provide a useful reference point to recast the history of Chinese overseas based on the changing aspirations of those who ventured outside of China and settled in various parts of the world. Wang’s conceptual schema is based on three stories that correspond to three historical periods. In the first one, which covers much of the Chinese history until the fall of the Ming dynasty (1644), China was preoccupied with its vast territory and did not pay much attention to peripheral countries surrounding the Chinese empire. By the time China was interested to do so, many of them were under the colonial influence of western powers, and Chinese settlements were well established in these countries.

The second period saw the emergence of a way of life among Chinese overseas, the sojourners’ way that became apparent in much of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wang described the sojourners’ way as one in which Chinese emigrants were seen as outcasts of China but nevertheless were expected to remain loyal subjects by maintaining a Chinese way of life and eventually returning to their homeland. However, in Asia, the Chinese migrants adopted many ways of sojourning, often accommodating to the local life by intermarrying local women or maintaining a male bachelor society bounded by religious and other social organizations. In Australasia and North America, the Chinese migrants were forced to maintain a marginal lifestyle as a result of racial discrimination and social exclusion. After 1900, however, sojourning took on a new life as Chinese overseas were no longer seen as disloyal subjects turning their backs on China, but were treated as patriots by reformers and revolutionaries of China, who sought after them for financial and political support.

The Chinese overseas were seen as hardworking, enterprising and patriotic, supporting China and aspiring to return one day. The battle over the hearts and minds of the Chinese overseas between the Nationalist government and the Communist Party continued until well into the second half of the twentieth century. The third period, mainly after the Second World War, witnessed the changing political scene of China under the communist rule, the formation of nation states in former colonies in Southeast Asia, and the gaining of civil rights in many countries in Australasia, North America and Europe. These changes eventually opened the option of multiculturalism in many countries, under which the Chinese minority gained equal rights, became upwardly mobile, and developed various forms of identity that bore different degrees of proximity to Chinese culture, without necessarily maintaining an affinity towards the political regime of China.

The debate regarding how best to periodize the history of Chinese overseas has much to do with whether Chinese overseas were seen as a part of China or as a separate entity that developed into different settlements around the world based on local conditions and exigencies of life. Much of this debate surrounds the understanding of sojourning, i.e., seeing Chinese migrants as global subjects of China with a natural desire to return to their ancestral land one day and therefore maintaining an ephemeral migrant lifestyle in a transient foreign country. The idea of sojourning underscores another controversy surrounding the terms that have been used to describe the Chinese overseas. This controversy also reflects the contention over how much China as the homeland should be retained as a reference point in understanding the making of the Chinese overseas population.

Perhaps the best known of these terms is huaqiao, or Chinese sojourners. According to Zhuang (1989: 46), the term huaqiao became popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in China, but it first appeared in 1883 in a document written by Zheng Guanying to the high ranking Chinese official Li Hongzhang. However, in the official archives of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) prior to the twentieth century, the term huaqiao was rarely used. More commonly used were terms like huamin (Chinese people), huaren (Chinese) to refer to Chinese subjects settled outside of China; also used were huagong and huashang to refer to Chinese workers and Chinese merchants respectively (Zhuang 1989). By the early twentieth century, the term huaqiao had become an all-encompassing term for all Chinese overseas (Wang 1981: 125). By then, the term had also assumed a more positive connotation of Chinese overseas as zealous patriots and loyal supporters of China (Wang 2000).

Despite the popularity of the term huaqiao since the beginning of the twentieth century, its literal meaning of Chinese sojourning overseas implicitly implies a presumptuous jurisdiction of China over all ethnic Chinese outside of China based on a loose interpretation of descent. It also assumes a mentality among Chinese overseas that connects them to China and sets them apart from their adopted countries and local communities. Towards the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Qing dynasty adopted a policy to protect the Chinese overseas as subjects of China with a view to use them to consolidate the support for the imperial empire (Zhuang 2001). However, as Chinese outside of China settled in their adopted country and acquired the local citizenship, especially in the period after the Second World War, and as the People’s Republic of China officially abandoned the position of using race or blood relations to define Chinese nationals in 1955³ (Zhou et al. 1993: 277), the substantive implication of the term huaqiao to treat overseas Chinese as essentially subjects of China becomes untenable.

Since the term huaqiao or Chinese sojourners implies that Chinese overseas were subjects of China emigrated to foreign countries with the desire or intention to return home eventually (Siu 1953; Purcell 1965: 30), some scholars now advocate using a more neutral term “Chinese overseas” to refer to ethnic Chinese outside of China, in recognition of the fact that many Chinese immigrants and their descendants have acquired the citizenship of the adopted country where they also settle permanently and have developed many forms of identity with the adopted country (see Wang 1991, 2000). In the official discourse of China, the term haiwai huaren, or overseas Chinese (often rendered as Chinese overseas), is now more often used to refer to those ethnic Chinese who have acquired the citizenship of their country of residence, while the term huaqiao is typically retained for those Chinese immigrants who maintain the citizenship of China.

Another debate emerged in the 1990s that tended to muddle the conceptual boundary of the term “Chinese overseas” by linking it to the economic development of China. The market reform of China in the late 1970s and the subsequent economic growth in the coastal regions of China prompted a new interest in Chinese overseas, especially in the role they played in investing in China’s rapid development. Harding (1993: 664) coined the term of “new transnational Chinese economy” to refer to the connections in the prosperity of coastal regions of China, the economic expansion of Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the emergent financial influence of Chinese capitalists and firms within the international Chinese community. Other terms have surfaced in the literature to map this loosely defined economic system, as for example, Asian Chinese Common Market, Chinese Economic Community, and Greater China Economic Sphere (Harding 1993: 666). Among the many interests in what has been called “Greater China” is the role played by “overseas Chinese networks” in facilitating the growth in the so-called “transnational Chinese economy.” Simply put, ethnic connections and personalized relationships among the international Chinese community are believed to be instrumental to Chinese capitalists and firms in facilitating their business ventures, and in promoting the economic growth in coastal regions of China since the market reform of the late 1970s. As well, the tendency of ethnic Chinese in different parts of the world to engage in business and commercial ventures is often attributed to their ability to preserve cultural values and cultivate ethnically based networks for business developments (Douw et al. 2001; Lever-Tracy et at. 1996). In this discussion, the notion of the Chinese diaspora is often used as a substitute for Chinese overseas with a much relaxed and sometimes imprecise boundary.

In a book entitled The Chinese Diaspora and Mainland China, Lever-Tracy, Ip and Tracy (1996) made the clearest case in suggesting that a distinct type of capitalism premised on trust and particularistic networks or guanxi has long developed in the Chinese diaspora, but it was in combination with the reform and new opportunities in China that a synergy was produced that drove the economic prosperity in China and surrounding regions. Lever-Tracy, Ip and Tracy were careful in making a conceptual distinction between the Chinese diaspora and mainland China, but they were less meticulous when they included in their analysis investments from Hong Kong and Taiwan to mainland China and the role guanxi played in these ventures as aspects of Chinese diaspora capitalism. It was Redding (1993: 2) in his discussion of the spirit of Chinese capitalism who explicitly grouped Hong Kong and Taiwan as parts of the overseas Chinese community on the grounds that they were originally from China and continued to think of themselves as Chinese. Thus, in trying to demonstrate the prevalence and interconnectedness of Chinese entrepreneurship in the Chinese diaspora, some authors have incorrectly included Hong Kong and Taiwan in the discussion and have muddled the conceptual boundary of overseas Chinese.

The foregoing discussion makes clear that neither nationality nor sojourning mentality should be considered in dem...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Population and distribution
• PART II Mainland China and Taiwan's policies on the Chinese overseas
• PART III Migration:past and present
• PART IV Economic and political involvement
• PART V Localization, transnational networks and identity
• PART VI Education, literature and media
• Index